Professor Simon Lewis

Biography

Simon Lewis is Professor of Global Change Science at University College London, as a half time position. He holds an equivalent position at the University of Leeds. Simon was a Royal Society University Research Fellow (2004-2013), and in 2011 received a Philip Leverhulme Prize recognising the international impact of his research. In 2014 he was listed as one of the world’s most highly cited scientists in the Environment/Ecology field (see highlycited.com). He gained a PhD from the University of Cambridge studying in the Department of Plant Sciences.

Simon is a plant ecologist by training with a central focus on the tropics and global environmental change including climate change. His primary interest is in how humans are changing the Earth as a system. This is because one of the key issues facing humanity in the 21st century will be to address how a population of at least 8 billion can lead fulfilled lives without breaching environmental thresholds that may cause serious social, economic and environmental disruption, or even more severe outcomes.

The more specific focus of his research is to gain a synthetic understanding of the recent, current, and likely future compositional and functional trajectory of the tropical forest biome. That is, to understand how and why tropical forests are composed of the tree species that form these forests, understand their important functions, such as how much carbon they store and cycle, and understand how these systems are changing due to local, regional and global environmental changes, and ultimately how they may change in the future. Dr Lewis’ research on tropical forests and climate change has been covered by newspapers, TV and radio worldwide, including the BBC, CNN and the Sun newspaper. He is regularly asked for comment on tropical forest and climate change related science.

Professor Lewis’ research intersects several policy relevant areas, including tropical forests and their deforestation and degradation, climate change, biodiversity conservation, the prospects for indigenous peoples, rural poverty, and the global trade systems for products from tropical lands. Therefore, he is involved in both public understanding of science activities, such as writing newspaper commentary and giving public talks, and engages with policy makers. For example, Simon hit the headlines following a successful campaign to have a misleading article in the Sunday Times removed at the height of the poor reporting of climate change-related science following the collapse of the 2009 Copenhagen international negotiations and the release of some climate scientists emails (aka ‘climategate’). On the policy side, Simon assisted drafting of Inter-Academies Panel (IAP) statement on tropical forests and climate change released to coincide with the Copenhagen UN conference on climate change. IAP is a group of 103 national academies of science, including all the G20 countries. Simon has been interviewed on the BBC’s Today program several times, and occasionally contributes science-policy commentary pieces to the Guardian newspaper and the journal Nature.

Simon has supervised or co-supervised nine successful PhD students, and currently supervises a further six students (three in Leeds). He has 31 successful grant applications from his PhD onwards that funded his PhD, post-doc and fellowship positions, obtained from ten funders including the National Environment Research Council, Royal Society, Leverhulme Trust, Government of Gabon, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation. He has published 12 book chapters, 3 major databases and 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including in Science, Nature and the world’s oldest ongoing scientific journal, Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society. In addition, he has given invited lectures on every inhabited continent.

Professor Lewis founded and co-ordinates the only African network of on-the-ground tropical forests monitoring plots where individual trees are tagged and monitored over time, called AfriTRON (African Tropical Rainforest Observation Network). This requires extensive fieldwork in very remote locations. AfriTRON currently spans 10 countries across tropical Africa, and with its sister network in South America (RAINFOR) consists of >500 locations and >300,000 trees being monitored. They are housed in a data repository, co-founded by Professor Lewis, at www.forestplots.net.

Levine NM, Zhang K, Longo M et al. (2016) Ecosystem heterogeneity determines the ecological resilience of the Amazon to climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,113, 793-797.

The Human Planet

A remarkable exploration of the science, history and politics of the Anthropocene, one of the most important scientific ideas of our time, from two world-renowned experts

Meteorites, methane, mega-volcanoes and now human beings; the old forces of nature that transformed Earth many millions of years ago are joined by another: us. Our actions have driven Earth into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. For the first time in our home planet's 4.5-billion year history a single species is dictating Earth's future.

To some the Anthropocene symbolises a future of superlative control of our environment. To others it is the height of hubris, the illusion of our mastery over nature. Whatever your view, just below the surface of this odd-sounding scientific word, the Anthropocene, is a heady mix of science, philosophy, religion and politics linked to our deepest fears and utopian visions.

Tracing our environmental impact through time to reveal when humans began to dominate Earth, scientists Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin masterfully show what the new epoch means for all of us.

Review

A careful explanation of what society is doing to this amazing planet and its people. I was absolutely gripped. Brilliantly written and genuinely one of the most important books I have ever read (Ellie Mae O’Hagan)

Profound and thought-provoking, this book does a remarkable job explaining where the current proposal to define a new human-dominated era properly fits (Thomas E. Lovejoy, winner of the Blue Planet Prize)

Understanding what it means for humans to have become a geological force reshaping the workings of the Earth is both a deep intellectual challenge and a political necessity. Richly thought through and provocative from its title onwards, The Human Planet rises to that challenge, bringing together Earth history and human history in a new way. Its reassessment of the past will equip its readers to understand the future -- and perhaps to improve it (Oliver Morton, author of The Planet Remade)

Today scientists increasingly believe that we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene. In this succinct but sweeping re-evaluation of the human story, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin show exactly why this abstract-sounding contention should radically affect our views of today and tomorrow. The Human Planet packs more ideas into a small space than I would have thought possible (Charles C. Mann, author of The Wizard and the Prophet)

Comparative ecology of tropical forests. The long-term project collects and collates collates long-term phytodemographic data to better understand the commonalities and differences amongst the three major tropical continents, Latin America, Africa and SE Asia, with a major focus on Amazonia, the Congo Basin and Borneo. Currently funded by the EU FP7 GEOCARBON program, http://www.geocarbon.net/, Phillip Leverhulme Prize and ERC Advanced Grant called T-FORCES, tropical forests and the changing earth system. http://www.tforces.net/ . Past funding from NERC, Royal Society.

Forest restoration: A project to quantify the impacts of differing management techniques to restore degraded lands to increase carbon storage and biodiversity. We ask: the such interventions worth the investment, or is merely waiting for nature restore itself enough? Includes fieldwork in Uganda and Malaysia, led by PhD student Charlotte Wheeler, and funded by NERC and Permian Global.

Understanding Central African peatland complexes: This project was designed to discover and quantify the extent of peat underlying the swamp forest of the cuvette centrale of the Congo Basin, understand how the system functions and how much carbon the system stores. Consisted of several field campaigns to central Congo, led by Leeds PhD student Greta Dargie. Forthcoming papers likely soon. Funded by NERC, Wildlife Conservation Society and a Phillip Leverhulme Prize. See: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27492949

Merging ground and satellite data to monitor tropical forest carbon stocks and fluxes: There is some controversy about both remotely sensed data for monitoring tropical forest and the carbon they store (as satellite data is an indirect estimate of forest biomass and carbon), and ground-based in situ inventory plot measurements (as they are generally at a very low sampling density, if we are concerned about making inferences over large spatial scales, and are also an indirect estimate of forest biomass and carbon). My view is that combining both techniques is essential to providing the most accurate measurements of tropical forest biomass and carbon storage. Funded by the EU GEOCARBON program, http://www.geocarbon.net/, and ERC Advanced Grant called T-FORCES, tropical forests and the changing earth system. http://www.tforces.net/.

Tropical soils: I have been collecting and analysing, for physical and chemical characteristic, soil from as many of the long-term forest inventory plots as possible, to begin improving our understanding of soil physical and chemical factors on forest growth, dynamics and carbon balance. An early paper utilising this data showed that after accounting for soil fertility Asian forests were considerably more productive (in terms of aboveground wood production) than Amazonian forests (Banin et al. 2014).

The Anthropocene. I have been developing a new research program on the Anthropocene, the idea that human activity has altered the Earth System so dramatically they we are now the major driver of change in the Earth System today, and so we have entered a new geological epoch, termed the time of humans, the Anthropocene. First papers on this should be published in 2015, and new PhD student beginning research on this topic shortly.

Impact

Research Impact

My research includes major contributions to networks of long-term tropical forest inventory plots, which now constitute a pan-tropical on-the-ground observatory of tropical forests. This is an international networks of scientists (from >50 institutions, >250 participants and >30 nations) using standardised methods developed, honed and propagated across the tropics. This enables, for the first time, the use of on-the-ground observations to make a direct evaluation of the role of tropical forests in the global carbon cycle and to assess their sensitivity to climate change (Lewis et al. 2009; Nature; Phillips et al. 2009, Science; Lewis et al. 2011, Science; Pan et al. 2011 Science). As well as having a major impact on international debates on the future trajectory of climate change and appropriate policy responses, this work is influencing national-scale efforts across the tropics to monitor forests in the face of climate change and to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degradation. Various research impacts are summarised below.

African Tropical Rainforest Observatory Network (AfriTRON): Dr Lewis founded and co-manages a network of long-term inventory plots across 12 countries in tropical Africa (Lewis et al. 2013, Phil. Trans B.). This network has contributed to forest management in Gabon, for which Dr Lewis was a technical advisor to the government of Gabon, at the UN climate change talks in 2009 (Copenhagen), 2010 (Cancun), and contributed data to Le Plan Climate National [The National Climate Plan] of Gabon. Additionally, Lewis acted as a technical advisor to the government of Gabon at the Central African Forest Commission (COMIFAC) to discuss how carbon storage and carbon fluxes in the Congo Basin should be monitored. Currently, Lewis alongside John Poulsen (Duke University) and Sassan Saatchi (NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, UCLA) are assisting the government of Gabon in a national forest monitoring program. Dr Lewis was also an external consultant for Centre for International Forestry planning phase of the pan-tropical USD100 million ‘Sentinal Landscapes’ program. http://www.afritron.net

Forestplots.net: This is a global repository for long-term forest inventory data, co-founded with Prof Oliver Phillips, Dr Tim Baker and Dr Gabriela Lopez-Gonzalez (all University of Leeds). Extracted data has been used in >50 publications, resulting in >1000 articles across print, TV and radio worldwide. Contained within the foresplots.net database is the global wood density database, co-created by Lewis (led by Amy Zanne, George Washington University), itself the most downloaded dataset on the datadryad repository. http://www.forestplots.net

GEOCARBON: This is a project to develop a global carbon observing and analysis system to integrate in situ (ground monitoring) measurements, with atmospheric measurements and models to monitor the emissions of carbon from human activity, with the stores and fluxes of carbon in the atmosphere and across the world’s land surface and oceans to give a comprehensive understanding of the global carbon cycle and how humans have perturbed it. The AfriTRON plot network contributes to GEOCARBON. This EU funded Euro8.8million project is a precursor to an operational global monitoring system. http://www.geocarbon.net

Public policy: While it is the job of society generally to determine policy positions, politicians to formally define agreed rules, and citizens and the judiciary to hold politicians to account, scientists can contribute to societal debates via timely information to assist the public in their decisions. Dr Lewis has contributed to this, for example, back in 2005 the UK government distributed a paper of his on tropical forests and avoiding dangerous climate change to other countries at the UN climate talks in Montreal (published as Lewis et al. 2006, in Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, Edited by Schellnhuber et al.). In 2009, Dr Lewis contributed to drafting the InterAcademies Panel (the global network of science academies) on tropical forests and climate change (http://www.interacademies.net/File.aspx?id=10070). More recently he published a short piece in response to the UN Rio+20 conference on some of the difficulties of deciding on and implementing planetary boundaries (Lewis 2012 http://www.nature.com/news/we-must-set-planetary-boundaries-wisely-1.10694). Dr Lewis also spend a week in the European Parliament shadowing an MEP (Linda McAvan) to learn about how policy-makers do their work. Dr Lewis serves on the Conservation Committee of the Association for Tropical Biodiversity and Conservation, the world’s largest scientific society focusing on tropical biodiversity. The committee releases timely reports to assist choices when specific policies, projects or activities may negatively impact biodiversity and the people who directly rely on it.

Public lectures: Dr Lewis has given lectures at as diverse locations as the Natural History Museum, as part of the Sebastião Salgado ‘Genesis’ exhibition (2013 on Science and exploration), the British Film Institute (2010, on Gaia theory), the ‘Reclaim the Power’ anti-fracking protest camp at Balcombe (2013, basics of climate change science), and in front of hundreds of riot police at the Camp for Climate Action protest outside the European Carbon Exchange (2009, basics of climate change science).

Dr Lewis was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011 in recognition of the international impact of his research.

There are a large number of researchers at UCL working on biodiversity-related topics, across Geography, the Centre for Biodiversity and Environment Research (CBER), the Environment Institute, Earth Sciences, Anthropology, the Energy Institute, Archaeology, Genetics, Evolution and Environment (GEE) and others. The Biodiversity Forum and Seminar Series is a chance to talk across departments and faculty, to foster greater collaboration (particularly now the NERC DTP is funded which can facilitate cross-departmental PhD projects).

The forum met for the first time on Tuesday 19th November, and meets on the third Tuesday of every Month, at 4pm, room 432, No. 16 Taviston Road (fourth floor, UCL School of Slavonic Studies building), or occasionally other nearby rooms within the same building. The Forum is intended for post-docs and staff as well as masters and PhD students who have an interest in biodiversity, very broadly defined, from discovering new species to policy impacts on biodiversity, and spanning the past, present and future of biodiversity.

Usually there will be three speakers, each giving 10-15 minute presentations around a broad theme. Most months have only two people booked so far, so if you would like to speak, please email Dr Simon Lewis (Geography, s.l.lewis@ucl.ac.uk). PhD students and post-docs are encourage to present their work within the upcoming themes.

Refreshments provided. The idea is that having the forum at 4pm means those who have to leave at 5pm can, but those that want to chat, can continue.

Timetable

4 pm March 18th 2014. Biofuels and Biodiversity

4 pm Tuesday 15 April 2014. Biodiversity & Geo-engineering

Please pass this message round your networks, and feel free to suggest topics and speakers for May and beyond.